In the summer of 2016, many students sat on a hunger strike in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. They were protesting the punishment meted out to them by the university authorities for having demonstrated against the hanging of Afzal Guru.
It is eight years since communal violence swept the second poorest, deeply-forested district of Odisha, Kandhamal. We must not allow the erasure of this hate violence from public memory, because the suffering and displacement of the tribal and Dalit Christians targeted by the communal violence…
Three men have been marched to the gallows in recent years in India. All three were convicted of terror crimes. By contrast, I cannot recall a single person awarded the death penalty for communal violence since Independence.
In urban India some imagine that caste demarcations have become history. We need to only check the caste identity of those employed to clean the toilets in our offices and homes to recognise how wrong they are.
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older. The cruel traditions of the past 2,000 years have trapped them into stigmatised occupations, regarded ritually “unclean”.
In Uttar Pradesh, the BJP-RSS combine is using its usual communal card. The Samajwadi Party is complicit. Rahul Gandhi has tried to raise some relevant issues, but it’s not backed by credible evidence of sustained ground-level engagement. That leaves the BSP-led Mayawati. If indeed the Dalit and Muslim voters across UP heed Mayawati’s call, it…
The public lashing of Dalit men in Una, Gujarat, for skinning a dead cow was what caused the Dalit fury in the state. But the community’s anguish is much older.
A middle-aged man who repairs shoes on a street corner in Ahmedabad and who has slept for many years on the pavements of the city is one among the hundreds who joined the Azadi Kooch, the protest march from Ahmedabad to Una village in Gir Somnath district against the public lashing of Dalit men for skinning a dead cow.
There’s a shameful practice with a tragic legacy that has gone on in India for millennia. It involves entrapping women, men and even children into a hated and humiliating occupation only because of the accident of their birth into the lowest caste.
Home-based work absolves the owners and managers of global supply chains from any legal obligations of fair wages, healthy work conditions and social protection to the actual end-line workers who labour in isolated home-based units.